Rainy Saturday seems like time to cook

January 12, 2013

Not to mention it’s the first Saturday in a month I haven’t been traveling, or doing something else that took me out of the house. A run to the grocery and Sams may take me out of the house today, but that’s about it.

Healthy stuff. Brown rice, shrimp, quinoa, spiinach.

So, before we commence to ponder on what we might cook today, let us first review a meal I made for the kids last week in Nashville. I’d read the recipe for this salad in the New York Times’ Recipes for Health section; I altered it a little (subbed quinoa for wheatberries, so Child C and I could eat it, gave it a bit of an Asian dressing, and made shrimp fried rice to go with it.

Got too much oil in the dressing, but remedy that and you’d have you a good salad.

3 cups fresh spinach, roughly chopped

8 oz mushrooms, sauteed (shiitake would be good, but I had cremini, and those weren’t bad)

1 cup quinoa, cooked and cooled

1 large Granny Smith apple, diced but unpeeled

1/2 cup toasted walnuts

Dressing

2 tbsp rice vinegar

1 tbsp mirin

1 tbsp sesame oil

dash of sriracha

1 tsp of grated ginger (I was forced to use powdered)

Whisk it all together.

Put salad ingredients together after quinoa and mushrooms have cooled. Add dressing and toss.

Do not, as I did, add some more neutral vegetable oil because you thought it was going to need it. It did not.

Also found a way to cook the rice that makes it easier to make fried rice. Before cooking (I used brown rice), rinse the rice in a colander with cold water until the water runs clear. Then boil in twice as much water as you would normally use. When the rice is done, drain it in the colander. This makes a less sticky rice that, when dry, separates more easily for the frying process.

I put onion and garlic and carrots and peas and salad shrimp into my rice, along with tamari and mirin and rice vinegar and sesame oil. Didn’t add an egg, as I was keeping things vegan for Son-in-Law 1.

All in all, it was a right healthy meal, and moderately tasty as well. You and y’mama ‘n ’em can do some nice stuff with baby spinach.